I have worked with NetApp’s Data ONTAP for many years and much of my career revolves around my knowledge of the platform. Recently, I joined the NetApp A-Team and, of course, I jumped at that opportunity.  For the past 6yrs, I have worked on many and exciting automation opportunities. A very important feature of Data ONTAP is the one OS approach. As a developer and automation architect, this is an important point and gives me confidence that what I do for one type of NetApp array would then work for all NetApp arrays. For the past 2yrs, I have developed almost exclusively using ONTAP Cloud in AWS and now Azure. Every bit of the code that I developed using ONTAP Cloud for AWS as the underlying storage just works for my clients.

ONTAP Cloud is a software-defined virtual machine version of the NetApp ONTAP operating system.  The virtual machine (VM) is deployed in AWS and/or Azure in a pay-as-you-go model. Being able to simply ‘spin-up’ and ‘spin-down’ my environments is a major selling point for me.  I can create extremely elaborate scenarios to reproduce client configurations with the same features.  Over a year ago, a client requested the ability to do a full disaster failover and recovery for Windows File Shares (CIFS) from the east coast to the west coast.  I could do 100% of the development inside of my AWS account and created many ‘disaster-pairs’ with a multitude of configurations. The benefit to me was that I could create a dozen of these systems and build many different configurations.  Once I completed the code, I shared it with the client and it worked perfectly for every use case.  When I finished the project, I deleted the ONTAP systems.

In the world of DevOps and Code-defined architecture, a huge challenge has always been in the enterprise storage space.  The ability to leverage ONTAP Cloud as my development platform and then deliver the code to run on physical systems is a huge benefit for my clients and me.  In the upcoming weeks, I will start a new series on a project that I am working to complete.  In this case, I am building a PowerShell based Desired State Configuration (DSC) engine for doing declarative provisioning of NetApp.  I bet you can’t guess what I am using to do all the development…